An underwater archaeological survey of the Mediterranean just a few
miles
off Egypt's north coast has revealed the remains of two 2,500-year-old
cities, possibly Menouthis and Herakleion, which served as trading hubs
in
the Late Dynastic Period. Divers, working under the direction of Franck
Goddio of the Paris-based Institut Européen d'Archéologie Sous-Marine
and
archaeologists from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities have located
well-preserved remains of houses; temples dedicated to the gods Isis,
Serapis, and Osiris; port facilities; fallen monuments; statues;
inscriptions; ceramics; and late Islamic and Byzantine jewelry and
coins,
all embedded in the sea floor less than 30 feet below the water's
surface.

Discovered 1.2 and 3.5 miles offshore from Aboukir, respectively, the
two
cities, which were founded sometime in the sixth or seventh century
B.C.,
are known from ancient authors. Strabo, who visited Egypt in 26 B.C.,
described the geographic location of the cities and their opulent way
of
life. Herodotus, writing four centuries earlier, described the cities
of the
Nile Delta as looking like the islands of the Aegean set amid a marsh.
The
Greek historian specifically mentions Herakleion and its temple
dedicated to
Herakles. Herakleion had served as Egypt's principal commercial port
until
the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.

By the fifth century A.D., however, these cities along with the
Hellenistic
capital of Alexandria had been destroyed, toppled by a series of
earthquakes
and tidal waves that struck the Egyptian coast, centered, according to
Stamford University geophysicist Amos Nur, on a nascent fault line that
stretches from Sicily to Cairo. Written sources tell us some 23
earthquakes
struck North Africa between the years A.D. 320 and 1303, a particularly
severe one in the summer of A.D. 365. Over time the coastline dropped
more
than 20 feet, the cities along it collapsing and slipping beneath the
waves,
and gradually buried by silt depoisted by the Nile. The cities are
located
in what was once the Canopic Branch of the Nile which disappeared in
the
tectonic activity.

A black granite head of a pharaoh embedded in the seafloor (Christoph Gerigk, Hilti Foundation) [LARGER IMAGE]

Goddio, who gained notoriety with his work on what may be the remains
of
Cleopatra's palace on the now submerged island of Antirrhodos in
Alexandria's Eastern Harbor and the discovery of Napoleon's Lost Fleet,
sunk
at Aboukir in 1798, has spent two years looking for the cities. "With
Herakleion, in particular, we have an intact city, frozen in time,"
said
Goddio.

Among the most extraordinary finds have been remnants of the so-called
Naos
[temple] of the Decades (Ital Naos of the Decades) a fourth-century B.C.
black granite shrine found among the fallen remains of what may have
been
the city of Menouthis, which had been a suburb of a larger town,
Canopus,
also mentioned by ancient authors. Dedicated by the Pharaoh Nectanebo
I, who
reigned from 380 to 362 B.C., the shrine was inscribed with images and
texts
explaining the annual calender of 36 decades (ital decades) or ten-day
periods defined by the appearance and disappearance of stars known as
decans
(ital decans) in the night sky. The texts describe the influence each
star
was believed to possess over nature, animals, and humans--both
communally and
individually.

A slab from the so-called "Naos of the Decades" a black granite shrine
commissioned by the pharaoh Nectanebo I in the
fourth-century B.C. The temple is inscribed with texts and images of
the
stars which governed the night sky throughout the year. Additional
fragments of the shrine are on view at the Greco-Roman Museum in
Alexandria
and are in the Egyptian collection of the Louvre in Paris. (Christoph Gerigk, Hilti Foundation) [LARGER IMAGE]

Two slabs from the chapel, which are currently in the Greco-Roman
Museum in
Alexandria were recovered by the Ottoman Prince Omar Tousson, a pioneer
in
underwater archaeology, in 1940. In 1957, scholars realized that
another
part of the temple, a mysterious pyramid-shaped block, discovered on
the
beach at Aboukir in 1777, was among the objects in the Egyptian
collection
of the Louvre in Paris. "The newly recovered fragments," says Goddio,
"provide abundant new information on the workings of the Egyptian
calendar."
Save for a few choice pieces, which will go on display in Egypt, Goddio
and
his team plan to leave the ancient remains undisturbed for future
generations.